


Family Night

by tawg



Series: Hawkeyes and Handlers [2]
Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Established Relationship, F/M, M/M, Other, bishop family issues, dating superheroes and secret agents is not without its drawbacks, hawkeye bantering, the three of them hanging out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-07
Updated: 2014-01-07
Packaged: 2018-01-07 20:40:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1124150
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tawg/pseuds/tawg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kate is getting ready for a night out, Clint is all settled for a night in, and Phil isn't used to making plans either way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Family Night

“Your bathroom is too small,” Kate grumbles loudly. Most elements of Phil’s studio apartment are small. It’s what he likes about it – minimal hiding spaces. His wardrobe doesn’t have doors and there’s no space underneath his bed. There’s also less and less space on his floor, on countertops as time goes by and the Hawkeyes maintain their habit of dropping in on him. 

“Why don’t you use Clint’s bathroom?” Phil calls back. Clint is sitting on the foot of Phil’s bed, playing Mario Kart. The Wii Fit had been a ‘get well sooner’ gift from Jasper, and Phil had never bothered to unpack it. He can’t even remember which injury it had been for.

“Clint keeps using my face stuff,” Kate returns. Clint mumbles something about that being a lie, and Phil doesn’t get involved. He doesn’t mention that Kate has an entire mansion of bathrooms at her disposal, should she elect to use it. And a few bathrooms in a warehouse. He doesn’t get involved with other people’s family drama. “Also, Clint doesn’t have any food.”

“I have coffee,” Clint protests. “And bread.”

Kate pokes her head out of the bathroom and gives Clint a dark look. “Mouldy bread,” she says, disdain dripping from her voice.

Clint shrugs. “Still, bread.”

Keeping his fridge stocked around the stomachs of two avengers is less of a challenge than Phil had anticipated. Partly because food gets eaten faster, with the downstream effect that he throws less away. Mainly because they tend to order out, and his fridge ends up crammed with leftovers and four different types of milk. Phil has been drinking a lot of smoothies of late, just to try and keep the milk situation under control. 

Kate had turned up in Phil’s apartment wearing blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up, a plaid shirt in blues and lavender, and a pair of purple high-top sneakers. She’d had a small duffel bag in one hand, and a dress bag over her shoulder. Clint had turned up after the leg-shaving and before the moisturising had begun, without comment or explanation, and had slotted neatly into one third of Phil’s apartment. Phil was left standing in his kitchenette, drinking coffee and scrolling through the news on his tablet. 

Phil doesn’t have many idle moments, but more and more of them ware spent this way. Quietly observing Clint and Kate. Gradually getting drawn into mediating their squabbles. Slowly learning to peck at them and ruffle their feathers in little ways. An odd friendship, because he’d never been exactly close to Clint, and had only peripherally been aware of Kate until the two of them had teamed up and ganged up and fired up at him.

“Ugh,” Kate grumbles as she works product through her hair. “I hate these things.”

“Don’t go,” Clint says simply.

“I have to go.”

Clint shrugs, his eyes on the screen. “So go.”

“You’re no help,” Kate says flatly, and Phil can see the line of Clint’s cheek change, can see a hint of teeth in his reflection on Phil’s television screen and know that Clint is grinning. 

“Not like my family ever got invited to balls,” Clint replies easily. “Let alone threw one.”

“It’s not a ball,” Kate corrects. “It’s a charity thing.”

“Charity ball.”

“It’s not a ball.”

“As far as I’m concerned, everything you do is balls.”

“You couldn’t handle my balls.”

“Children,” Phil chides mildly from his position of supervision. They can ignore him if they chose (and often they do), but in this moment they settle back into their own tasks for a moment. 

Kate pulls her hair away from her face and clips it at the back of her head, pulls a makeup bag out of her duffle bag, pulls out a smaller bag dedicated to eye-related decoration from that. Bags within bags within bags. Hiding microdots in makeup kits is an old favourite, because the products and their arrangements were usually a mysterious confusion. An unfortunately gendered perception, but Phil had once spent an entire weekend taking apart every beauty product in a suitcase and examining it for smuggled information. His hands had been a mess, but it had been a positive experience if only because they hadn’t been a mess with other things.

“What’s your family like?” Kate asks, and it takes a moment of silence in which Clint doesn’t reply for Phil to realise that the question was directed at him. 

He pauses, black coffee in his mouth and he pushes the liquid into one cheek and then sucks it back through clenched teeth. He gives the question some consideration, before going with the simplest answer. “I don’t know,” he replies. 

“Thrilling story hour, with Phillip Coulson,” Clint comments idly.

“It’s a pretty boring origin story,” Phil agrees.

“We’ll have to work on that,” Kate informs him from the bathroom.

“Maybe he was raised by wolves?” Clint suggests.

“I was raised by wolves,” Phil replies.

“Why didn’t you say that?” Kate asks irritably. “That we could have worked with.”

“I was never invited into a wolf kinship unit,” Phil informs her solemnly. “So I can’t really call them ‘family’.”

“Even among wolves, you were an outcast,” Kate says, with a dramatic sigh at the end. “Very romantic.”

“Not especially,” Phil replies. “Smelling like wolf isn’t exactly romantic.”

“Could be worse,” Kate returns. “You could smell like Clint.”

“I smell fucking amazing,” Clint informs the room.

“You smell like ass.”

“He smells like your face cream,” Phil volunteers.

“I’ll take that compromise,” Clint says firmly. 

“Come help me with my hair,” Kate calls. Clint doesn’t move from the end of the bed, so Phil accepts responsibility for the mission and moves slowly towards his bathroom. 

The small room smells unfamiliar with the variety of products Kate has applied to her body. Shaving gel that has a mellower smell than his own soap, body oil that has a nutty quality to it, the loud contrast of faux-fruit that is associated with some kind of hair treatment spray. There is a tiny bottle of perfume sitting on the edge of the basin, and Phil stares at it and wonders what it’ll contribute to the cloud of Kate-ness. Takes another mouthful of his coffee and inhales deeply while his nose is in the mug, clinging to a constant for few moments more because he’s still not sure why Kate is in _his_ bathroom of all places, because there’s some piece of this puzzle that he’s never managed to find.

Kate starts wriggling out of her crop top of a bra, and Phil has to lean back against the doorway to give her space. She’s wearing a pair of purple boxer shorts, and while they don’t look to be an especially comfortable fit they are patterned with a cartoon of Clint’s face and a little logo of crossed arrows against a target.

“Nice,” Phil comments. Clint looks over, and grins when he sees them. 

“They feel cheap,” Kate replies, and shimmys out of the boxers of well.

“They’re Clint’s,” Phil replies. “Of course they do.” Clint snorts at them and returns his attention to the game. Phil isn’t sure where to look as Kate strips out of casual undergarments in preparation for formal ones. This isn’t a sexy kind of naked so it doesn’t feel right to put that gaze upon her, but she had called him over and it seems rude to avert his eyes. 

“When am I going to wind up on underwear?” Kate asks as she pulls on some support briefs. She tugs them all the way up to the bottom of the rib cage and they have little legs that stretch partway down her thighs. 

“I’ve got a whole pile you can wind up on,” Clint replies, and Phil has a sudden image of Kate curled up in a nest of painfully purple undergarments. 

“I have to deal with your gross underwear enough as it is,” Kate calls back, as if she hasn’t stripped Clint out of his clothes in the past, pushing his underpants down his hips and making a show of dragging them down his thighs as Phil watched. As if she doesn’t steal Clint’s clothes, walking around in his boxers and one of Phil’s shirts, and Phil never quite understands why she would want to cover herself in them.

“Seriously though,” Clint says, glancing over at Phil. “You ever need underpants, I can hook you up.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Phil replies as Kate tugs a strapless bra into place, putting her hands under the cups and pushing up as she wiggles her shoulders and settles her breasts down. The bra is black and the briefs are a beige colour that would never, ever pass as a skin tone. It looks oddly utilitarian, her ensemble. She has a fit, tight body and there aren’t really any problems that the underpants would solve. Phil supposes it could be a mental thing. Agents insist on wearing what makes them most comfortable, what makes them feel most in control of their own bodies. Phil isn’t so rigid in his own preferences, but he hasn’t felt in control of his own body for years now.

“Come on,” Kate says, turning to face the mirror and then turning a little further so her back is to Phil. “Hair.”

Phil isn’t sure what Kate expects of him, but he runs his fingers through her hair, feeling damp and slippery and sweet, and considers the dark strands. He puts a hand on her shoulder and turns her to face him, presses his thumb against her chin and she tilts her face down. Phil knows how to braid and so he braids her bangs across from left to right. It looks thin and wimpy, so he tugs his fingers through the braid to dislodge it and tries again. He pulls more surrounding hair into it the second time, the centre of the braid running half an inch above her hairline. When he gets to her ear he goes back a little further, and then pauses until Kate hands him a little elastic tie. There’s a lot of hair left, and so Phil starts from the right and braid back across to the left. A thick, shiny braid that isn’t tight but isn’t structurally unsound either. Two braids across her head like crowns. Like organic tiaras or circlets that need to remain hidden under hair. His fingers feel soft and slick when he’s done, the product that softens her locks having soaked into his skin. 

He’s not sure where to go from there, but Kate turns around and inspects herself in the small mirror. A critical look as she turns her head from side to side, but her mouth quirks up and she gets a look on her face that is a cool kind of pleased. She takes over then, twisting the rest of her hair up into some kind of roll of a bun at the back of her head, pinning it in place with pins that blend in so perfectly with her hair that they disappear. The end result is something of a mix. A little regal and a little childish, and Kate seems to think that it suits. “Cool,” she says as she twists her neck and tries to see the back of her head in the mirror.

“Wait,” Phil says. He doesn’t have many oddments in his apartment. Or at least, he didn’t before Hawkeye nesting season. But there are a few items that he’s collected that don’t have a home, and they all seem to end up in a drawer in the bathroom because all of the other drawers are part of a larger system of organisation. 

Kate’s hairpins are all the neat little modern kind, bent it two with little wiggles along the length that allow them to grip hair and hold it close. Phil emerges with an older style of hair pin, a metal stick with a jewel at the end. He hands it to Kate, and she inspects it. He’s never had it valued and perhaps she can pick out all the flaws that mark it as a cheap and disposable thing. But it’s light and sturdy, and that’s an uncommon enough combination that he’d felt the little thing was worth keeping.

“This how you keep your hair looking so neat?” Kate asks before taking the pin between her teeth and picking out her own dark pins.

“I just need to feel pretty sometimes,” Phil replies with a deadpan voice. He picks up his coffee, takes another sip. “Also, I stabbed someone with it once.” Kate pauses, and in her reflection Phil can read her wondering whether she really should be holding it in her mouth of all places. He keeps his smile small, hides it behind another mouthful of coffee, but she sees it anyway and glares at him. 

“Out,” she says when her hair is secure. “I need to do my face.”

Phil lingers for a moment longer, watching the stray hairs at the nape of her neck, watching the odd freckle shift across her shoulder blades as she rests one hand on the sink to anchor herself and leans in close to that little, chipped mirror mounted on the front of Phil’s overcrowded medicine cabinet to pat concealer under her eyes.

When Phil steps back into the main room, his phone vibrates angrily on the kitchen bench. “It’s your weekend off,” Clint says without looking away from the race. He hasn’t won a single one yet, but he has at least crept up to fourth place. 

“Mm,” Phil says as he checks for the caller ID, heads for the door with his phone still buzzing in his hand.

“Who’s that?” he hears Kate ask as he slips through the door and into the damp, sad hallway beyond.

“Work,” Clint replies.

“I thought it was his—” Her words are cut off by the door swinging closed behind him, by his footsteps on old carpet which is in turn stretched over older stairs. Going up, standing in the top of the stairwell with his back pressed against the door to the roof. Swipes a thumb across the screen to answer the call, and holds it to his ear without saying anything. It’s his personal phone, he has no need to introduce himself. 

The call is brief, but it leads to an errand of sorts. Less than an hour later he is back, a paper bag filled with large cookies from a nearby deli in one hand. The apartment is mostly silent, Clint having put the television on mute once no one was around to benefit from the soundtrack.

“You missed Kate,” Clint tells him, sprawled across the bed and propped up on one elbow. Not the best position for playing video games, but Clint isn’t especially gifted in that area anyway. Has few skills to compromise. Phil tosses the bag of cookies at him, and it hits the side of Clint’s head with a crackly thump and a curse from Clint. 

“I had to meet a friend for coffee,” Phil replies, which is not entirely untrue. “She look nice?” he asks, stepping over to the kitchen bench to drop his phone amongst the ephemeral detritus. 

“Always looks nice,” Clint replies through a mouthful of white chocolate and crumbs. He hasn’t bothered to pause the game, instead letting the race run on without him as his attention shifts. Flopped over onto his back and staring up at the ceiling. Bag in one hand, half a cookie in the other. The stubble across his face is uneven. A mix of absent-minded shaving and neat scars and questionable facial hair to begin with. The last of the sunlight slipping through Phil’s narrow window catches on the hairs, turns an unremarkable dusty colour into something bright and shimmering.

Phil toes his shoes off as he walks across the room, two little pauses in short strides before he’s sitting on the edge of his bed, sitting on covers that had been neatly made until Clint had graced them with his presence. Phil sits with his back against the headboard, his legs draped over Clint’s. Clint stretches, twists, and one of his shins ends up behind one of Phil’s knees. “She looked great,” he finally admits.

“Good.”

“She was gonna say bye, but she had dinner with her folks. Couldn’t really kill any more time.”

“I know.”

Clint sucks at his lower lip, runs his front teeth over it and collects a few stray crumbs. He’s frowning up at Phil’s ceiling, his jaw shifting as the tip of his tongue digs matted batter out of the valleys and crevices of his back teeth. “She looked really great.”

Phil nods, shifts a leg so Clint’s tangle in his slightly more comfortably. “I never know either,” Phil says at last, because Clint won’t say it and perhaps Kate isn’t thinking it yet. “When you’ll get called out.”

“You usually know before I do.”

“I meant both of you.”

Clint frowns, an expression made with angry eyebrows and a distasteful wrinkle of his nose. His jaw remains unclenched, his mouth looking soft and damp and sweet. Clint probably knows the uncertainly more intimately than Phil does. Phil has spent a lot of his life working with people who may never see the end of the day. But he’s never had a legacy to be passed on, never had the odd mix of adoration and resentment that his Hawkeyes seem to have for one another.

“Not like any of us can hold down a real job,” Clint says, and when his gaze flicks over to Phil there’s a small smile of his lips and something uncertain around his eyes. 

Phil squeezes Clint’s leg between his own. Not comforting so much as a statement of continued presence. Kate’s never had one, Phil is too good at turning them down, and Clint just isn’t good at retirement. Who can honestly settle for a real job when there are so many unreal ones that need doing?

“What are you doing for the rest of the night?” he asks.

“Kicking your ass at Mario Kart until Kate comes home,” Clint replies, and then he twists to pull another cookie out of the bag, his shirt riding up to show the pale skin of his side, such a contrast to the rough tan of his arms and face. Phil puts a socked foot on Clint’s side, jams his heel against the hollow of Clint’s hip and pushes him down the bed.

“You’re welcome to try,” he replies, using the quiet surety that gets orders followed at SHIELD. Not that it has ever worked on a Hawkeye, and not that Clint has much of a reputation to lose if Phil does manage to win the mushroom cup.

It’s an odd thing. Phil’s apartment had always just been a space for him to pack himself away in at the end of the day, at the end of days when no one has things for him to be doing. A place where he can be safely unconscious and sometimes has access to clean socks and underpants.

But there had been something so effortless in the way Clint had described it as a home.


End file.
